A Palliative For My Guilt

There was a narrative in the early days of the pandemic about how Covid was a salve for the environment. While humans cowered in their homes with the corona virus rattling the doors and windows, nature was advancing. Greenhouse gas emissions were down and wildlife roamed the streets of America’s largest cities. Unfortunately, the impacts of the pandemic on the parks and wildlife of the African continent went largely unreported.

Tourism is a major industry in many African nations. For some countries, it was the second or third largest sector of the economy prior to the onset of Covid. But without tourists, the tourism industry isn’t worth much money. Without tourists, parks don’t make money to pay for maintenance, rangers, and anti-poaching divisions. Without tourists, you don’t need drivers, guides, cooks, waiters, launderers, house keepers, bar tenders, etc. For two years, Covid largely shut down the tourism industry in Africa. Even this year, most of the travelers are people who had bookings for 2020 and 2021 and had to postpone, as I did.

While Covid raged, workers in numerous sectors of the African economy returned to their villages where parks provided a subsistence living. Poaching animals and clearing forests for planting crops has taken its toll. In several parks, we saw elephants with the ends of their trunks amputated by snares. In Madagascar, the number of lemurs and chameleons is noticeably reduced from the last time I was here in 2017. One of the parks I visited then, was known as the best place to see Fossa, a predator endemic to the island, but Fossa kill chickens and Fossa are edible. The Fossa I saw lounging in the shade of the ranger station in 2017 hasn’t been seen since the park reopened. In the same park, returning rangers found corn planted in cleared patches of the park’s forests. When they removed the crops, they were confronted by villagers in such number that the rangers had to retreat.

I often feel guilty about the cost of my travels. Planes and safari vehicles emit greenhouse gasses and money spent to pursue my wildlife passion is money not spent somewhere else, but this trip, I’ve also seen the cost of people not travelling to see the parks and wildlife of the world. If local people don’t perceive the value of protecting the parks, they merely see them as resources off of which they can scrape an existence. While wildlife in America was on the advance, nature in Africa was being routed. Since its all about me, I'll take this as a palliative for my guilt.

Dunes in Namibia.

Namibian dunes from the air.

Shipwreck in the Namibian desert.

There are numerous colonies of Cape fur seals along the skeleton coast. This one checked us out while we kayaked in the shelter of a bay.

Indigenous rock art at Twyfelfontein, Namibia.

Damaraland, Namibia.

Desert adapted elephant at Damaraland.

Nothing like a good dirt bath on a hot spring day!

Sunset at Damaraland.

My first wild white rhino :-)

This rhino was one of three that made their way to the watering hole in front of our lodge where we got a chance to watch them for quite a while. A little rhino TV while we ate dinner.

Etosha National Park, Namibia. Oryx on the salt pan in the background. Springbok in the foreground.

The heat was so intense this day that only the wildlife that was very close to the road could be photographed without looking blurry from the heat waves.

Juvenile pale chanting goshawk.

This is one of the last wild elephants I'll see for a while. Namibia was my last stop on the African continent.

Might as well take as many photographs of him as I can. Who knows when I'll be back.